WIN OR DIE

The famous saying “Win or Die”, was said for first time by Demarato, Spartan king. “Aut Vincere, aut mori”, the generals of the ancient Rome said it after the war.

Time later, the saying was immortalized by the Argentinian revolutionary – Ernesto “Che” Guevara, icon of the Latin America of the sixties. Today is the motto of the Chilean navy.

In ancient times the humans had creeds which to struggle: politic or religious ideologies, for dignity of the homeland, for justice or against the poorness. Others rose in arms to leave all and to get to the end: life or death. With the same forces some of the fought for imposing ideologies, other ones to defend the homeland and other ones to defend the people.

Today seems that the ideals dwell among spider webs. It looks like a craziness to die for some those. Give the life for a politic or religious tendency? It sounds like story of nineteenth. Defend that mistress called justice for, no doubt, die trying? Some few seem to be willing.  

This XXI Century is the response to a paradoxical XX Century that not only left us the sowed horror in two World Wars, the demonstration that the human being can make up effective ways to produce death factories (like the concentration camps)., some electronic advances and the almost magic computer age; the human being also shaped two types of people: the mass and the individualist, with a huge shortfall in human quality, with little choice for the consolidation of the person: who has it clear that the “us” just can be built with the binomial “you” and “me”. It is not neither the lost anonymous individual in the mass nor the lonely incapable individual of recognizing itself into the other.

We venture to probe a hypothesis: it exists a relation between the death of the passion that the big causes arouse and the advent of marketing that emerged with the force of a tsunami (before the needing of leveling the supply and demand) to let the people could get into debt to buy as much as it appeared in the shop window. The goal, that it’s not about comfort already, it has installed in the neurosis of the ambition, the accumulation and the depredation. Us for being busy on buy and accumulate, we lost the notion of the big ideals that in another time marked the north of the mankind.              

This neurosis, which it does not possess an ideological tint because the marketing has pulverized and has diluted them in financial statements of losses and profits, it has installed as an only target: it doesn’t matter to obliterate the human being, it does not matter to plunder the place where people lives, it does not matter if we make him to be out of water, without air, without soil. What it matters; it’s that the enterprise presents a productivity which can make the enterprise to be competitive and that its owners can accumulate and accumulate and accumulate…ad infinitum.  

The challenge on which this society debates just has one name. It’s not about dying in an armed combat for an ideal. It’s from the base that the armed fight will be always a human failure; in our opinion, it’s about to make up ways of restoring the society to be able to understand that the money is not the aim, but the way to work out. If really we are so smart, let’s do it!

Who will restore us this mining colombian territory that is being exploited without regarding the consequences for the life? We understand that it is absurd to object to the exploitation of a mineral if such exploitation is for many people, by the profitability of the money that over there can be generated, supplying the basic needings of life: food, dwelling, health, education and recreation.        

But what is it really going on? Where not many people are being benefited, but few are being benefited, generally groups and enterprises, which obliterate without consideration the soil and say, take steps to mitigate the harms of the nature. To the government seems appropriate exploitation “because we have to let go in the foreign investment, not in any way, though”, but the implementation of such measures for mitigating it’s not enough, according to the local communities, which are enduring the problem.

And meanwhile some say it, the others show and those assure, a swirl of sues forms, contra-sues, wardship, right to petition in parallel with a exploitation that keeps on runaway because of the ambition that makes up as much as way of eluding controls and to make pass by legal what it’s immoral.

What we have today it’s an ethics challenge. We have to retake at least one of the ideals that let us come back through the right path: the person, its dignity, the covering of its basic needs and the conservation of its only one, until now, suitable place for the surviving: the earth (with the air and the water, three elements that until now in no scientific laboratory has not gotten to invent). And if we not get to win with this ideal, we’ll die.

We say that at least one of the ideals, because when we understand that the person is the first on the face of the earth, and that that first one it’s not me, but the other, the quite a few problems as mankind will be solved.                  

Daniel Congote Tamayo.
Social Communicator